Geography and earth science

This is the list for reading a map and a news bulletin at the same time, and one entry has a second life in English that it does not have in French. Le glissement de terrain is the landslide on the hillside and nothing else. In English « landslide » left the hillside long ago: « a landslide victory », « he won by a landslide », and the picture behind it is of earth coming down all at once and burying everything under it. French reaches for water instead. An election won by a crushing margin is un raz-de-marée électoral, a tidal wave, or simply une vague; the hillside is never mentioned. And the bare noun goes the other way entirely: un glissement in political French is a slow drift, as in un glissement de l’électorat vers la droite — a shift nobody noticed while it was happening, which is the opposite of the sudden collapse the English idiom is built on. So a sentence about an election result needs the water word, and glissement stays with the ground and with anything that moves by degrees.